Fostering Transdisciplinary Collaboration Through Transdisciplinary Literature Reviews: Investigating the Accessibility of mHealth Technologies

Transdisciplinary research aims to investigate complex problems by integrating knowledge from multiple disciplines through knowledge co-creation. Initiating and planning transdisciplinary research requires a thorough review of the literature within many disciplines, demanding that researchers conciliate meanings of concepts from different disciplines, define the boundaries of each discipline within the topic and identify synergies between disciplines. Thus, conducting a transdisciplinary literature review can pose a challenge to researchers, and little guidance is available on how to approach this challenge in a systematic way. To address this, we develop a protocol for transdisciplinary literature reviews, extending the heuristics proposed by Leavy (2011). We describe how researchers can determine the relevant bodies of knowledge for the issue investigated, how they can locate and summarise relevant literature from all relevant disciplines, how they can determine the scope of each discipline within the project and how they can visualise the interaction between disciplines in regards to the topic researched. We also suggest methods for researchers to create new interactions between disciplines and propose new conceptual frameworks on the basis of the literature synthesis performed in the transdisciplinary literature review. To demonstrate how our framework can be employed to review literature on complex issues while integrating knowledge from multiple disciplines, we use the issue of accessibility of mHealth technologies as a case study and apply our guidelines to conduct a transdisciplinary literature review on the topic. We integrate findings from the social sciences, ethics, economics, law, psychology, medicine and engineering, among other disciplines to examine the accessibility of mHealth and propose promising areas for future transdisciplinary projects. The findings from this case study suggest the proposed transdisciplinary review guidelines can be used as a sole research methodology for initial transdisciplinary research projects, as well as an auxiliary tool for larger transdisciplinary projects.